Clive Anderson reflects on a busy career at Petworth Festival

It was during his 15-year legal career that Clive embarked on stand-up comedy and script writing before rising to fame as the host of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on radio and then television, winning the 1991 British Comedy Award.

Clive went on to front ten series of Clive Anderson Talks Back on Channel 4 and four series of Clive Anderson All Talk on BBC 1. His guest appearances have included Have I Got News For You, QI, Mock the Week, Countdown and Fighting Talk. There is going to be plenty to talk about.

“I first did this show in Edinburgh in 2019 and then we thought we would do it in theatres around England. I had to make it into a longer show. Edinburgh was just a one-hour job and it was great to have to expand it because I found it really difficult to keep it down to an hour. We were going to launch it in March 2020. I think we maybe got one or two shows done but then obviously it was the lockdowns. We were able to start again last year.

“(With the pandemic) I am of sufficient age to have had various things to carry on from my past though at the time obviously I had a huge amount of sympathy for people who were just beginning on their careers. One of the things I do is host a Radio 2 programme called Loose Ends and usually it's people coming into the studio and chatting but we were just able to carry on with me in the studio and them at home during the pandemic. Usually we would have a band or a singer in the studio entertaining the other guests, but during the pandemic some of them were recorded but at least we were able to carry on and that was good.”

And it is lovely to get back to the solo show now “It didn’t change a lot during the pandemic but the show changes quite a lot anyway due to my incompetence! I try to force myself to do it as much as possible in the way that I have done it before. A lot of it is looking back, going to back to my first steps in performing and the various shows I've done, and Macbeth does provide the link between a lot of it.”

As for that transition from the law to comedy: “It was a gradual thing but there were a couple of vital steps. I used to do bits and pieces of comedy in my spare time. People have skiing or stamp collecting or whatever as their hobbies but mine was comedy and comedy was a hobby with benefits to a certain extent. I used to do show warm-ups for some of the things I had written and somebody said that they needed someone for a radio programme and on the back of that one of the producers had Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

The programme started as a BBC radio series and it was very quickly suggested that it would work on TV: “But the BBC missed the moment. By the time the BBC have been persuaded that they should consider doing it as a TV programme it had been snatched up by Channel 4 and we did ten series.”

It was all exciting times – and to an extent Clive comes full circle now with his first solo show since his very early stand-up days: “There is a myth that I was the first performer ever at the Comedy Store but I think Alexei Sayle must have been the first.”